One major common problem faced by cellular and landline service providers is market competition. In today's climate of competitive markets, cellular service providers have found that one way for them to grow market share and defend their businesses is to be proactive and form alliances, and to partner with landline service providers. In addition, cellular service providers seek to differentiate their service offerings, and to capture the largest portion of market revenue by meeting an ever increasing demand for access to a wide range of media forms such as MP3 encoded audio, still and video imaging, data, instant messaging, and email. In a similar manner, the landline service providers have found that to grow market share and ward off competition, they too must be proactive and form alliances, and to partner with cellular service providers. Support for broad economical access to these converging forms of communication is needed to enable unfettered market growth, and to support the development and use of new handheld devices needed to provide increasing levels of mobile multimedia communication functionality.
Although the formation of alliances and partnerships between cellular service providers and landline service providers may help to ward off competition, such alliances and partnerships are faced with other problems. For example, the erection of cellular infrastructure such as cellular towers may be an expensive venture since this may require acquisition of real estate, whether in the form of outright purchases or through leasing. Cellular infrastructure also requires the establishment of one or more expensive backbone links to handle core network traffic. Another cellular-related problem is that the cellular signals do not penetrate and propagate in buildings such as homes and offices very well. This is especially true with the frequencies that are typically utilized in the United States, which may vary between 800 MHz and 1900 MHz or 1.9 GHz.
The use of digital media is growing at an extremely rapid pace. Most consumers today have a variety of devices that gather, store, process, generate, communicate, play back, and/or display information electronically, in a digital form. Examples of such devices include digital still and video cameras, personal digital assistants (PDAs), laptop and desktop personal computer (PC) systems, video cassette recorders (VCRs), personal video recorders (PVRs), document and photo scanners, digital and high definition television sets, stereo audio equipment, and cellular phones, to name only a few. The use of portable devices capable of exchanging digital media via a wireless communication link offers the consumer the opportunity to enjoy multimedia entertainment including, for example, audio and video media while traveling. Present day wide area communications systems such as wireless cellular networks support limited bandwidth for transmission of data, and therefore restrain access to high-quality multimedia information. Broadband access to multimedia information, however, is spreading quickly, and wireless broadband standard such as IEEE 802.11 can support improved quality of service compared with wide area wireless alternatives such as cellular. Support for switching of consumer electronic devices from one access path such as, for example, a cellular network, to another access path such as, wireless broadband, during media access is virtually non-existent. Most current cellular phones cannot access wireless broadband networks, and devices able to access wireless broadband networks do not normally support access to data via cellular service providers.
Access to streaming (real-time) multimedia programming generally requires that the user be aware of the capabilities of the device being used for access, and may require that the user specifically access multimedia information content that has been prepared with the capabilities of the access device in mind. Awareness and understanding of such details exceeds the interest and fear of the unknown of the majority of consumers. This places unnecessary limits on the market for flexible, mobile multimedia information content, equipment, and services.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.